Experimentation is the second step of crafting an item, the first being Assembly. It is where most of the benefits and bonuses come from for an item.
If you succeed on the Assembly check you get to move to the Experimentation phase. This is where the bulk of the crafting stats matter, and where most of your choices come in. It is super critical to understand the relationship between your current crafting stats and the decisions you can make in order to make the best items possible.
Below is an example of an Experimentation phase.[1]
- The resulting item. The statistics on the item will update as you resolve Experiments.
- Your Skill: This is the “Experimentation” value in your character sheet. It determines how effective each pip is when modifying the stats of the craft. See the glossary of terms for more details.
- Difficulty: The base experimentation difficulty of the item. This is just the base, the experiment will get harder the harder we push for more power!
- Experimentation Pips: Here is where we allocate our pips. These are dictated by the Experimentation Points stat in your character sheet. Each pip will roll a die and be modified based on your Experimentation Skill vs the Final Difficulty of the experiment. Each roll will modify the stats of the item by a certain value. You can place up to 10 pips in each individual statistic on the crafted item.
- Stat Increase: This is the result of your experimentation: the percent increase of stats to each given line item. You are looking to push this number as high as you can! Below is the amount of bonus stats per roll you get by default. These values are not cumulative:
- Critical Failure: -7%
- Failure: +0.00%
- Moderate Success: +0.95%
- Success: +1.85%
- Good Success: +4.47%
- Great Success: +5.20%
- Amazing Success: 6.65%
- Additional Risk: This is a drop-down menu that lets you increase the Final Difficulty of the Experimentation in exchange for more bonus stats per pip. You have to balance this carefully; as failed experiments on higher risk levels make your item worse than better successes on lower ones! The below are not cumulative:
- No Additional Risk: +0 Difficulty, +0% Bonus Per Point.
- Negligible Risk: +30 Difficulty, +0.63% Bonus Per Point.
- Marginal Risk: +40 Difficulty, +1.23% Bonus Per Point.
- Critical Risk: +50 Difficulty, +2.98% Bonus Per Point.
- Catastrophic Risk: +60 Difficulty, +3.47% Bonus Per Point.
- Are You Insane?!: +80 Difficulty, +4.43% Bonus Per Point.
Note: These values are not modified by the result of the Experimentation roll. So if you get a Failure with Negligible Risk you get 0.63% bonus stats.
- Added Difficulty: The amount of difficulty added by the Additional Risk you take on.
- The amount of Bonus stats you get per-point based on your Additional Risk.
- Final Difficulty: The actual number your Experimentation stat is checked against to see how successful each Experimentation pip is at affecting the item’s stats.
- Small Reroll: Click this button and pay the cost to automatically increase the quality of the three worst rolled pips per-line-item by at least 1 step.
- White Difficulty Reroll Cost: 10 Ethereal Dust
- Green Difficulty Reroll Cost: 20 Ethereal Dust
- Blue Difficulty Reroll Cost: 40 Ethereal Dust
- Purple Difficulty Reroll Cost: 80 Ethereal Dust
- Orange Difficulty Reroll Cost: 160 Ethereal Dust
- Large Reroll: Click this button to reroll all pips on all line items. This is a complete reroll and can cause your item to come out worse if you are unlucky enough!
- White Difficulty Reroll Cost: 1 Chaos Ember
- Green Difficulty Reroll Cost: 2 Chaos Embers
- Blue Difficulty Reroll Cost: 4 Chaos Embers
- Purple Difficulty Reroll Cost: 8 Chaos Embers
- Orange Difficulty Reroll Cost: 16 Chaos Embers
The ceiling on bonus stats from a single experimentation phase is +120.80%:
10 Amazing Successes at Are You Insane additional risk with a +1% bonus from the Attention to Detail Minor Discipline.